On the flyleaf of MFK Fisher’s annotated edition of Catherine Plagemann I wrote “I’m really excited about annotating this copy: Like being in conversation across space and time with both authors.”
I jumped into the book, then, with some high expectations. I find few things as thrilling as a robust conversation in the margin notes (part of the reason I like buying used textbooks is so I can write responses and revelations connected to the previous owner’s notes), so a chance to have a marginalia-based interaction with one of my favorite food writers, about a new-to-me food preserving book? That is a peak life experience right there.
I adored this book. I adored the conversation the authors had in its pages (even though Plagemann of course wrote the book without realizing it would become this annotated volume decades later). I’ve talked before about the interaction between text and reader, and how a book is not just a static object but a site for meaning-making between both author and reader (who both might have very different interpretations of the same thing).
A cookbook presents a different version of this, because we’re not working with philosophical texts or other works that we traditionally consider being more open to interpretation. Cookbooks are considered by some, in some contexts to be didactic instruction manuals more than interpretation-heavy texts (sorry, I love nuance too much to make a broad and inaccurate sweeping statement here). And so the interaction between text and reader is in some cases fundamentally different than a reader’s experience of purely narrative text.
Leaving the many nuanced and context-driven rabbit holes we could go down exploring examples of and exceptions to the above, what I loved about this particular book was that we got to see those interactions made explicit, and in this case, they aren’t just about the instructions themselves: They meander across memory, local food systems, and a range of other subjects (I talked a bit more about this last week).
MFK Fisher’s writing is in my experience both conversational and authoritative, and I found I initially approached her margin notes the same way. With deference, almost, to this much more known and experienced writer of food.
However, as I went through, I asked myself to challenge that tendency, instead approaching the marginalia as a conversation, rather than taking the margin notes as the be all and end all of how one might experience these recipes.
What if I added my own thoughts, and gave them the same weight as the marginalia already on the page?
I do know a thing or two about food preserving, though as with anything there’s always more to learn.
And so, thrusting myself into the book as a conversation partner rather than a passive absorber of information, I added my own rather substantial layer of notes.
Sometimes, these focused on specific recipes. Sometimes, my experience with similar types of foods.
I played around with whose words I read first: I found it didn’t make a huge difference to my understanding or experience of the book if I read Fisher’s notes or Plagemann’s original text first, but it felt more like a conversation building on itself when I started with the original text and went forward from there.
I was surprised which recipes Fisher annotated and which she didn’t, since only about half the recipes in the book have margin notes from her. Some, like her favorite recipes, or ones she was skeptical of (like banana jam), have notes saying such. But others that I assumed she would have something to say about (like the cucumber ketchup I mentioned last week) have no margin notes at all. It was interesting, then, for me to add in notes on pages where the conversation became just between myself and Plagemann’s original text, a return to how I often annotate books, without an additional voice between myself and the original author to consider. Both also cite some additional books, briefly, like voices dropped into the conversation then just as quickly disappearing again, which adds another layer of exploration for me to dig around with.
Here are a few favorite recipes/annotations from the book: What annotations would you add to continue our conversation in the margins?
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